YugabyteDB YCQL Best Practices

YCQL is YugabyteDB's Cassandra-compatible API (port 9042). It provides global secondary indexes with strong consistency (ACID) — a key advantage over Apache Cassandra.

Schema Design

Partition Keys and Clustering Columns

Design partition keys for even data distribution and clustering columns for efficient range scans within a partition:

CREATE TABLE orders (
    customer_id UUID,
    order_date TIMESTAMP,
    order_id UUID,
    total DECIMAL,
    PRIMARY KEY ((customer_id), order_date DESC, order_id)
) WITH CLUSTERING ORDER BY (order_date DESC, order_id ASC);